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A Tabloid Shame, Exposed by Earnest Rivals

The phone-hacking scandal that is mushrooming in Britain, with arrests, skullduggery and influence peddling, would be a delicious story for The News of the World if it were not about the newspaper itself. Instead, the hunter became the hunted, and last Thursday Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation summarily slid the 168-year-old News of the World under a double-decker bus. Its final issue was Sunday.

In America, newspapers have been seen as an expensive hobby for Mr. Murdoch, the bane of the News Corporation’s shareholders, but as it turns out, the newspapers in Britain may end up being more costly to him in the long run.

So useful in wielding influence, if not producing revenue, his newspapers are the very thing that brought his company into the cross hairs, and delayed, at least temporarily, his efforts to expand it by gaining full control of British Sky Broadcasting, the largest pay television company in Britain.

Logic and fairness would suggest that it was folly to concentrate so much power in the hands of someone who already controlled many national media assets. So where was the outrage? Well, check who owns the megaphone. The News Corporation has historically used its four newspapers — it also owns The Sun, The Times of London, and The Sunday Times — to shape and quash public debate, routinely helping to elect prime ministers with timely endorsements while punishing enemies at every turn.

Don’t take my word for it. After David Cameron was elected prime minister, one of the first visitors he received at 10 Downing Street was Mr. Murdoch — discreetly through a back entrance — and Mr. Cameron spoke plainly last week about the corrosively close relationship. “The truth is, we’ve all been in this together,” he said.

“The press, the politicians and leaders of all parties.” To which a dumb Yank like me might say, “Duh.”

The only thing Mr. Cameron didn’t do was point to Mr. Murdoch himself. But he didn’t really have to after the tactical ruthlessness of Mr. Murdoch’s familiars was laid bare for all to see.

Newspapers, as anybody will tell you, aren’t what they used to be. Part of the reason that the News Corporation was willing to close down a paper with a circulation of about 2.7 million copies every Sunday was that its revenue was under $1 billion. (The News Corporation’s heir apparent, James Murdoch, has always seemed eager to shed some of the company’s newspapers, though I doubt that putting the nail gun to this paper was what he had in mind.)

Still, how did we find out that a British tabloid was hacking thousands of voice mails of private citizens? Not from the British government, with its wan, inconclusive investigations, but from other newspapers.

Think of it. There was Mr. Murdoch, tying on a napkin and ready to dine on the other 60 percent of BSkyB that he did not already have. But just as he was about to swallow yet another tasty morsel, the hands at his throat belonged to, yes, newspaper journalists.

Newspapers, it turns out, are still powerful things, and not just in the way that Mr. Murdoch has historically deployed them.

The Guardian stayed on the phone-hacking story like a dog on a meat bone, acting very much in the British tradition of a crusading press, and goosing the story back to life after years of dormancy. Other papers, including The New York Times, reported executive and police complicity that gave the lie to the company’s “few bad apples” explanation. As recently as last week, Vanity Fair broke stories about police complicity.

Mr. Murdoch, ever the populist, prefers his crusades to be built on chronic ridicule and bombast. But as The Guardian has shown, the steady accretion of fact — an exercise Mr. Murdoch has historically regarded as bland and elitist — can have a profound effect.

His corporation may be able to pick governments, but holding them accountable is also in the realm of newspaper journalism, an earnest concept of public service that has rarely been of much interest to him.

The coverage last week, on a suddenly fast-moving story that had been moving only in increments, destabilized the ledge that the News Corporation had been standing on. James Murdoch regretted everything and took responsibility for almost nothing. What looked like an opportunity for him to prove his mettle as a manager of crisis might yet engulf him.

Andy Coulson, the former editor of News of the World who became the chief spokesman for Mr. Cameron, has been arrested. And Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International and previous editor of The News of the World, responded by saying that it was “inconceivable” that she knew of the hacking.

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I’d suggest it was inconceivable she did not know, given the number of hacking targets. What editor doesn’t know where her stories come from, especially stories chock full of highly private, delicious conversations. Did Ms. Brooks think they were borne in through the window by magic fairies?

There are many theories about why she still has a job. Here’s one. A longtime Murdoch associate who spoke to him last week — and who did not want to be identified passing along a private conversation — said: “The more people call for her ouster, the more he will dig in. He is one of the most resilient C.E.O.’s on earth. and he will not cave unless something else goes wrong.”

That opportunity may yet arise. On Friday, Ms. Brooks met with the staff of The News of the World and obliquely told them that a component of the criminal investigation would lead to “a very dark day for this company” and make it clear why the paper had to close.

For a long time, the phone-hacking scandal was viewed as an intramural affair in which celebrities, royals and the people who hounded them slugged it out, with law enforcement mostly serving as a bystander. Everyone had fun with Fleet Street’s swashbuckling ways, right up until one of the buckles came undone to reveal that a 13-year-old murder victim and the families of dead soldiers were getting the same treatment as those residing in Buckingham Palace.

Only then did the public come off the sidelines, perhaps realizing that it was no longer O.K. to condemn the gossip gatherers while feasting on their daily morsels. Forget the government inquiries into the conduct of the press, the public itself seems to have had its fill.

The global implications for the News Corporation are tougher to discern. Will the damage jump the pond and hurt the company’s American operations or just be seen as a Piccadilly sideshow?

Americans may see a parallel between Fox News’s willingness to set up sinecures for Republican presidential candidates in waiting — Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich — and Andy Hayman’s trip from head of the hacking investigation at Scotland Yard to columnist for News International, for which he has written in The Times of London that the scandal was confined to “perhaps a handful” of victims.

The News Corporation’s Wall Street Journal has played it straight and acquitted itself nicely in covering its British siblings. But there are yet risks on this side of the ocean. Before he became head of The Journal, Les Hinton was chairman of News International, Mr. Murdoch’s British newspaper arm, and twice testified before Parliament that the company had conducted an internal investigation into the phone-hacking incidents.

In his second appearance before Parliament, he said the company had gone to “extraordinary lengths” to make certain the incidents had been confined to Clive Goodman, who was then the Royals reporter for The News of the World. That did not turn out to be the case.

As someone who has weathered time in the public stockade time and again, Mr. Murdoch surely remains confident that he will prevail. He wants the rest of BSkyB, and history says he always gets what he wants. But even for someone who has remained immune to consequence for so long, the hacking scandal has implications that may ripple beyond the shores of England — in part because Mr. Murdoch no longer has custody of the story.

In truth, a kind of British Spring is under way, now that the News Corporation’s tidy system of punishment and reward has crumbled. Members of Parliament, no longer fearful of retribution in Mr. Murdoch’s tabloids, are speaking their minds and giving voice to the anger of their constituents. Meanwhile, social media has roamed wild and free across the story, punching a hole in the tiny clubhouse that had been running the country. Democracy, aided by sunlight, has broken out in Britain.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com; Twitter.com/carr2n

A version of this article appears in print on July 11, 2011, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Tabloid Shame, Exposed by Earnest Rivals. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe